Tuesday, October 8, 2013

The Surprise Party

The federal government has been shut down, and
the Tea Party crowd (who make no bones about wanting to both shrink the
fed until it's small enough to fit in a bathtub - to paraphrase Grover
Norquist - and to drown it in there as well) is thoroughly enjoying the
situation. Indeed, for Tea Partiers, among the many other minions of the
business class, it's a veritable dream come true. All those regulatory
agencies that interfere with business (yet, in quasi-dialectical
fashion, preserve them all the same) are now out of the way. With the
EPA and OSHA shut down, worker safety and the environment, among other
aspects of the common good, will no longer interfere with the
accumulation of private goods (not that these agencies were such
effective impediments to begin with). Furthermore, and in demonstration
of the fact that the market only functions with the aid of state force,
"essential services" (which, in turn, confirm that the essence of the
state is not security, per se, but security in the sense of force) are
still very much in effect. As such, the business class can work its
workers and drill and mine and otherwise ransack the planet as much as
it likes.

Insofar as it relates to the ostensible
elation of Tea Party types, it is interesting to reflect upon Barack
Obama's recently articulated plan to neither budge nor otherwise give in to Tea Party pressure. For
if the Tea Party is enjoying the present situation, and if their
constituency is pleased - which they all appear to be - it is difficult
to see why the Tea Party would have any interest in budging either -
especially when they can "drill, baby, drill." Indeed, rather than
persuading the Tea Party to relent, intransigence on the part of Obama
would result, it would seem, in little more than mutual catatonia.

That
said - and though proclamations such as Obama's shouldn't be taken at
face-value - it takes little to recognize that a standoff involving
doing nothing is particularly advantageous for the Tea Party, and
disadvantageous for Obama. For if catatonia prevails, the federal
government will remain shut. And though Obamacare (the ostensible cause
of the shutdown) is already being rolled out, such a setup could very
well prove to be a merely pyrrhic victory for Obama. Among other
outcomes, the upcoming debt ceiling deadline could not only tank the
economy. Just as dramatically, Obama, (blatantly encouraged to do so by the New York Times already)
could equally disastrously resolve the upcoming funding crisis by
becoming a "sovereign dictator" - in the classic Schmittian sense -
outright. Yet (in spite of its counter-intuitiveness) none of this
should deflect from the fact that, when it comes down to brass tacks,
Obama and the Tea Party aren't really all that different in the first
place.

To be sure, though Paul Krugman has likened the Tea Party to a monster a la Frankenstein's -
created by the .01% and now rampaging out of control - the real
out-of-control monstrosity, it must not be overlooked, is the ecocidal
capitalist economy that Obama and the Tea Party - in their own
privatizing ways - each so zealously champion. That is, their merely
quantitative differences mask their actual, qualitative sameness.

Whether
their respective efforts to wholly privatize the public sphere is
advanced through charter schools, or giveaways of public land to private
interests, both are in agreement. The world must be divided - ordered -
into commodities - irrespective of the objective harm such a paradigm
provokes. And though it may be the ostensible trigger of the present
shutdown, we should not forget that - irony of ironies - Obamacare is
itself, in fact, a product of the same ideology, and of the same
business class, that produced the Tea Party. Not only did the Right Wing
Heritage Foundation essentially write Obamacare (as an alternative to Clinton's paltry healthcare efforts) the primary aim of Obamacare is not the distribution of healthcare. This
is apparent even in Obamacare's official name. As rising health costs
began to threaten the stability of the status quo (of the overall
stability of the existing Order) the Affordable Care Act was produced to
deliver "affordable" healthcare to the uninsured. Delegated
to the insurance industry via Obamacare, the provision of health care
has nothing to do with providing health care as a basic human right, but
serves the double function of distributing commodities - for the purpose of deriving profit - and maintaining the general Order.

In
spite of the fact that there is a patent conflict of interest between
providing care and reaping profit (and despite the fact that - in any
conflict in a profit-based system - profit prevails over care as a
matter of law) business is still in charge of the distribution of care,
reaping profits from a complex of social relations and obligations that
by all rights should not be determined by business priorities in the
first place. This dynamic will only be amplified once the "individual
mandate" is in place, compelling people to purchase this "product" -
under penalty of law - from the monopoly.

What's
more, even the Affordable Care Act's notion of affordability is
stilted. Though premiums are unknown at this point, as an example of
what a good deal people can expect, we are told that a 27 year old, in
good health, making 25,000 dollars a year (a near poverty income in many
parts of the country, by the way) will still have to pay close to 10
percent of his or her annual earnings to the industry to
secure care; this amount will be higher, of course, should this
hypothetical patient ever fall ill and receive actual treatment. And
this is an example of a particularly affordable plan. The healthy young
must subsidize the infirm old, we are told. That the healthy young, and
everyone else for that matter, must also subsidize the wealthy is
something that is less frequently discussed.

Defenders of
Obamacare will object. Important reforms have been made, they will
argue. Obamacare in fact ameliorates some of the grosser inequities of
the insurance industry (allowing people with pre-existing conditions,
for instance, to secure care). And look at how the Health Exchanges are
being gobbled up.

Bandwagon fallacies aside, the putative
popularity of Obamacare derives less from its merits (unknown and
untested) than from the fact that people in the US have been starving
for access to health care for generations. As is well known, starving
people will not only eat rotten cabbages, or boiled shoes, they will be
grateful for the opportunity of feasting on such rubbish. What's more,
they'll even pay for it. Deprivation (either real or imagined)
does this to people; treatment that might otherwise elicit disgust
elicits praise. And with the health exchanges open for business, and
some seemingly able to receive care, it is only one irony that the
government shutdown provoked by Obamacare should threaten the larger
Order Obamacare was designed to reinforce. Another one is that this
order - insofar as it is based on varieties of exploitation that
systematically reproduce all types of disease (from sleep deprivation to
cancer) - is itself a grave threat to the health of the people of the
world.

With respect
to all of these facts, and because the shortcomings and benefits of
Obamacare remain obscure, it is little wonder that people from across
the political spectrum (excluding those zealots of banality - the
Democratic Party partisans) remain dubious about the insurance
industry's new compulsory monopoly. Rather than Obamacare, poll after
poll reveal that a single-payer system (medicare for all - universal
healthcare) is consistently most popular - as much as it was when Obama
unilaterally removed the "public option" from the so-called bargaining
table prior to the negotiations that would lead to the ACA. Confirming
the notion that those with the power to define what is possible define
reality as well (and much to the insurance industry's presumed pleasure,
and the majority's chagrin) we now have Obamacare - as well as, for
now, the shutdown.

As
both Tea Party adherents and Obama, Democrats and Republicans, pursue
generally unpopular policies - and as the Obama regime, with its wars,
mass surveillance programs, drone strikes, and Romneycare/Obamacare
demonstrates the interchangeability of the two hegemonic parties - the
present shutdown may lead some to consider how the general public would
respond if a party pursued such a tactic (akin in some respects to a
general strike) not in furtherance of the demented populism of the Tea
Party, but in furtherance of a genuinely popular politics. For lest we
forget, when we hear the blather about how the shutdown is just
part of the messy project of a functioning democracy, we should remember
that Republicans and Democrats combined comprise less than a majority of the people.

That
said, it is interesting to consider how public opinion would respond,
say, to a government shutdown, and/or a general strike, that aimed to
secure, for instance, a single payer health care system, or an end to
the wars. Not merely the wars in Afghanistan, among other places, mind
you, but the so-called War on Terror in general, and the
War on Drugs as well; one whose goal included not only shutting down
Guantanamo, among other black site prisons, but sought to shutter our
extensive domestic prison system, too, and shutdown the government to do
so. One can already hear the predictable, pseudo-working class
argument that this would destroy jobs. And indeed it would. Moreover,
these jobs should be eliminated, for a just society should neither
reproduce such practices, nor have an economy that is dependent on them.
When confronted with the follow-up that asks how people would pay for
rent, among other necessities, one could envision such an imaginary
party responding by remarking that the transition to a just society (in
which positive rights to not only housing and health care, but
education, and leisure, among other conditions, would be realized) could
proceed by way of the institution of a Guaranteed Livable Income, not
to mention a ten-hour work-week. Further, one could add that student,
consumer, and other debts would be eliminated, too. To be sure, the
decrease in production involved in this is not only necessary to combat
global warming and environmental degradation, but for the sake of
well-being. In other words, not only would the War on Terror and the War
on Drugs be concluded, but the Class War itself - which subsumes these
lesser wars - would be ended. Along with other systems of domination,
capitalism (the sine qua non of which is domination and exploitation)
would be phased out; and political and economic power, as well as
political and economic rights and duties, would be redistributed
according to the demands of justice.

While
people criticize the Occupy movement for not congealing into such a
party - providing a counterweight of sorts to the Tea Party - such
criticism betrays a deeply flawed analysis of the Occupy Movement.
Notwithstanding the problem that inheres with parties in general (which
is a problem of dogma, and hierarchy, among other things, and is found
even in consensus-based organizational approaches), among its other
weaknesses the Occupy movement could not fully embrace such positions
owing to a fundamental split between its anarchistic, emancipatory
elements, and its very large contingent of pro-business libertarians and
liberals - libertarians and liberals whose fundamentally reformist,
pro-market sensibilities were, and are, not only at odds, but
irreconcilable, with the critical requirements of a genuinely
emancipatory politics. In spite of the good intentions of many in the
Occupy movement, this inability to not only fail to recognize the need
for, but the reasons for, decapitating capital (as well as the state)
brought it to a theoretical and practical impasse.

As the
federal government remains shut, and the NSA, among other "essential"
agencies, continues to function, and Fukushima continues to release its
lethal radiation, and the September jobs report, when corrected for
population growth, will most likely show virtually no sign of jobs, and
global warming continues apace, and the distribution of wealth polarizes
ever further into extremes of rich and poor, it seems as vital as it
seems unlikely that a "party" championing the above positions will
arise; which means that, should it appear, it would come as something of
a Surprise - a Surprise Party. Don't tell anyone.